News
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk explains why Blue Origin’s Starship lawsuit makes no sense
For the first time since SpaceX competitor Blue Origin took NASA to federal court after losing a Moon lander contract to Starship and a protest over that loss, unsealed documents have finally revealed the argument Jeff Bezos’ space startup is focusing on in court.
After the details broke in new court documents filed on Wednesday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk weighed in on Twitter to offer his take on why the arguments Blue Origin has hinged its lawsuit on make very little sense.
While one seemingly significant portion of the main complaint claiming to reveal “additional substantial errors” in SpaceX’s Starship HLS proposal was almost fully redacted, most of the opening argument is legible. In short, Blue Origin appears to have abandoned the vast majority of arguments it threw about prior to suing NASA and the US government and is now almost exclusively hinging its case on the claim that SpaceX violated NASA’s procurement process by failing to account for a specific kind of prelaunch review before every HLS-related Starship launch.
For NASA’s HLS competition, SpaceX proposed to create a custom variant of Starship capable of serving as a single-stage-to-orbit crewed Moon lander with the help of the rest of the Starship fleet – including Super Heavy boosters, cargo/tanker Starships, and a depot or storage ship. SpaceX would begin a Moon landing campaign by launching a (likely heavily modified) depot Starship into a stable Earth orbit. Anywhere from 8 to 14 Starship tanker missions – each carrying around 100-150 tons of propellant – would then gradually fill that depot ship over the course of no more than six or so months. Once filled, an HLS lander would launch to orbit, refill its tanks from the depot ship, and make its way to an eccentric lunar orbit to rendezvous with NASA’s Orion spacecraft and three Artemis astronauts.
As Blue Origin has exhaustively reminded anyone within earshot for the last five months, SpaceX’s Starship Moon lander proposal is extremely complex and NASA is taking an undeniable risk (of delays, not for astronauts) by choosing SpaceX. Nevertheless, NASA’s Kathy Lueders and a source evaluation panel made it abundantly clear in public selection statement that SpaceX’s proposal was by far the most competent, offering far a far superior management approach and technical risk no worse than Blue Origin’s far smaller, drastically less capable lander.
The bulk of Blue Origin’s argument appears to be that its National Team Lander proposal was drastically disadvantaged by the fact that SpaceX may or may not have incorrectly planned for just three ‘flight readiness reviews’ (FRRs) for each 16-launch HLS Starship mission. While heavily redacted, Blue Origin wants a judge to believe that contrary to the US Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) fair assessment that such a small issue is incredibly unlikely to have changed the competition’s outcome, it would have “been able to propose a substantially lower price” for its lander. To be clear, a flight readiness review is an admittedly important part of NASA’s safety culture, but it ultimately amounts to paperwork and doublechecks over the course of a day or two of meetings.
All else equal, the need to complete an FRR before a launch is incredibly unlikely to cause more than a few days of delays in a worst-case scenario and would have next to no cost impact. There is no reasonable way to argue that being allowed to complete some launches without an FRR would have singlehandedly allowed Blue Origin to “[engineer] and [propose] an entirely different architecture.” Nevertheless, that’s exactly what the company attempts to argue – that it would have radically and completely changed the design it spent more than half a billion dollars sketching out if it had only been able to skip a few reviews.
Curiously, Blue Origin nevertheless does make a few coherent and seemingly fact-based arguments in the document. Perhaps most notably, it claims that when NASA ultimately concluded that it didn’t have funds for even a single award (a known fact) and asked SpaceX – its first choice – to make slight contract modifications to make the financial side of things work, NASA consciously chose to waive the need for an FRR before every HLS Starship launch. Only via purported cost savings from those waived reviews, Blue Origin claims, was NASA able to afford SpaceX’s proposal – which, it’s worth noting, was more than twice as cheap as the next cheapest option (Blue Origin).
Ultimately, it thus appears that Blue Origin may have a case to make that NASA awarded SpaceX the HLS Option A contract despite a handful of errors that violated contracting rules and the HLS solicitation. Relative to just about any other possible issue, though, it’s hard not to perceive the problems Blue Origin may or may have correctly pointed out as anything more than marginal and extraordinarily unlikely to have changed the outcome in Blue’s favor had they been rectified before the award. Most importantly, even if Blue Origin’s argument is somehow received favorably and a judge orders NASA to overturn its SpaceX HLS award and reconsider all three proposals, it’s virtually inconceivable that even that best-case outcome would result in Blue Origin receiving a contract of any kind.
Elon Musk
Google just picked SpaceX for its first step into orbital AI
Google will launch its first Project Suncatcher AI satellite on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare next week.
Google is about to put its own AI chips into orbit for the first time, and it is paying SpaceX to get them there.
The company said Thursday that the first in-orbit test of Project Suncatcher, its research effort to find out whether space can host large-scale AI computing, will fly next week on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission.
The satellite, called MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator and carries four of Google’s Tensor Processing Units, the same chips Google runs in its ground data centers. Google originally planned to launch two custom satellites in 2027, but chose to move faster by integrating its chips into a satellite.
MVP’s solar panels supply about one kilowatt of power, and Google will run Gemini models on the TPUs only in bursts of roughly 15 minutes before the chips shut down so the radiators can shed heat. In a blog post, Google said its Trillium TPUs survived vibration testing that mimicked sustained launch loads of up to 10g, with individual components seeing 50 to 100g, and handled a radiation dose greater than a five year mission would deliver.
SpaceX and Google mull massive partnership on Musk’s orbital data dream: report
Next week’s flight, slated for October 1, follows a relationship that became public in May, when Teslarati reported that Google was in talks with SpaceX for a launch deal tied to orbital data centers. Google also holds a stake of roughly 6% in SpaceX.
The two companies are chasing the same idea from very different starting points. SpaceX’s own orbital compute program is built around the AI1 satellite, a roughly 70 meter structure derived from Starlink V3 hardware that is designed for 150 kW of peak compute, about 150 times the power MVP will draw. Elon Musk has brushed off concerns about crowding orbit with those satellites, and SpaceX is building its Gigasat factory in Bastrop, Texas, to produce them, targeting an annualized rate of about 1 GW of space compute by the end of 2027.
Musk also posted on X on Thursday that “the amount of compute in space will obviously round up to 100% of all compute.”
Google has been more cautious in public. Its research estimates that launch prices need to fall below about $200 per kilogram before an orbital data center can compete with a ground facility on energy cost, a threshold the company believes could be reached around the mid 2030s. The Suncatcher team has said it expects the effort to remain a project rather than a product for years, which leaves the first real test of its hardware riding on a rocket from the company with the most aggressive timeline in the field.
Tesla has taken another concrete step toward owning its battery supply chain, and it’s doing so with what is perhaps the most important vehicle in its short-but-storied history.
On September 23, Tesla announced that it has officially built the first Cybercab with cathode material produced in-house at the company’s first cathode plant in the U.S., and the first in the U.S. overall.
First Cybercab made using our in-house cathode material – from the first cathode plant in the Americas pic.twitter.com/X95aVXsT9H
— Robotaxi (@robotaxi) September 23, 2026
Active cathode material is the most expensive piece of a lithium-ion battery cell, and it often accounts for more than a third of cell cost. For years, the industry sourced a majority of it from Asia, but Tesla’s decision to make it in the United States bodes well for the Cybercab project. This is the latest chapter in Tesla’s vertical integration strategy, which began in public at Battery Day in 2020.
At the Battery Day Event, Elon Musk said the company would build a North American cathode plant and overhaul the process to cut costs and waste, while also making some of the most powerful and long-lasting cells in the industry.
The Austin facility took years to appear. Tesla filed permits for “Project Cathode” in 2022 on land near Giga Texas. By mid-2022, the building frame was up and Tesla later invested hundreds of millions of dollars as part of a larger expansion of the Giga Texas plant. The company stated it was operating the first large-scale cathode production facility in North America to supplement 4680 cell production.
One month later, that material reached a finished Cybercab.
Made with nickel cathode manufactured locally at Gigafactory Texas! https://t.co/DqMm5fZV3n
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 24, 2026
The timing of this breakthrough is monumental for the Cybercab program. As Tesla officially launched the first Cybercab rides to the public earlier this month, production of the ride-hailing-geared vehicle is moving forward on the planned S-curve that CEO Elon Musk told everyone to expect.
Nevertheless, packs of Cybercab units have been spotted throughout the United States, in an effort to potentially activate the fleet as soon as the company gains regulatory approval in various geographic areas.
On top of that, Tesla owning the cathode step and pairing it with its own in-house lithium from the Gulf Coast refinery shortens the supply chain that once stretched thousands of miles and subjects every pack to fewer external price shocks and geopolitical risks.
Tesla is not yet independent of all of its foreign suppliers, as some precursor metals come from mines and chemical plants. But the first in-house cathode Cybercab shows the company is closing the most expensive and most concentrated gap in its battery production efforts. For a vehicle like Cybercab to operate at a high utilization within the Robotaxi network, that control over cost is so crucial.
It is arguably as important as the software that drives it.
Tesla is set to inaugurate its dedicated Semi factory in Sparks, Nevada, this evening, but drone footage has already started to show who is expected on the handover stage.
Zanegler, a drone operator who regularly documents Tesla Semi operations in Nevada, filmed a row of new-generation Semi units parked outside of the plant with customer branding applied. The liveries visible in the video include companies like PepsiCo, U.S. Foods, Einride, DHL, WattEV, and others that have committed to utilizing Tesla’s Class 8 electric truck in their fleets.
Tesla Semi Pre-Reveal Revealed!
Excited to share this segment of the drone flight one day prior to the Tesla Semi Reveal event.
They have added branding to several Tesla new generation semis.
Including:
Pepsico
US Foods
Einride
LTS
Nevoya
OK Produce
ABF Freight
DHL
WattEV… pic.twitter.com/KoFOg2FouR— Zanegler (@HinrichsZane) September 24, 2026
Several of those company names already sit within Tesla’s public ordering book, including PepsiCo, which has been the program’s primary anchor customer since the first Semi deliveries in December 2022. PepsiCo now runs dozens of Tesla Semi units in daily service, with drivers completing regional routes.
Einride placed a 500-unit order in August, which was, at the time, the largest single Semi commitment. First deployments of their Semi units are planned for this month and will eventually span across California, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, and Georgia. Meanwhile, IMC Logistics announced a 50-truck California order this week.
Tesla Semi lands the biggest electric truck deal in U.S. history
Other names, like LTS, OK Produce, and HMD, have not been widely confirmed as firm buyers, but their presence on the lot is perhaps the clearest signal that Tesla intends to expand on that list this evening at the event.
Tesla first unveiled the Semi back in 2017 with a 2019 production target.
Limited pilot builds reached PepsiCo in late 2022, and high-volume production began at the new 1.7-million-square-foot plant that sits logically positioned next to Tesla’s Gigafactory Nevada. Tesla Semi program director Dan Priestley has said that Tesla expects to build “many thousands” of Semi units this year, but as with every Tesla release, there have been set expectations of an S-curve ramp.
Outside estimates still put 2026 deliveries in the 5,000-to-15,000 range, but it will ultimately depend on Tesla’s readiness to put those units out, as well as how smoothly production is moving internally.
Tesla’s Semi Rollout event is set to start tonight at the Sparks factory, and it will be livestreamed on X starting at 6 p.m. PDT / 9 p.m. ET.
Google just picked SpaceX for its first step into orbital AI
Tesla Cybercab gets initial tie-in to localized, in-house cathode plant
